


In Soft and Sheltered Spaces

by sibylsleaves



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Tiny bit of Angst, really just two assholes being assholes, spoilers for blue lily lily blue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-15
Updated: 2015-02-15
Packaged: 2018-03-12 23:03:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3358589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sibylsleaves/pseuds/sibylsleaves
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This time it's Ronan who's fluently disdainful of Adam's clumsy attempts to communicate. Until he realizes what Adam is really trying to say.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Soft and Sheltered Spaces

“Ronan,” Adam says, and suddenly the syllables have the power to break Ronan into pieces. “I know. I’ve known for—a while.”

  
And Adam must think he’s an idiot, or that Ronan thinks _he’s_ an idiot, because of-fucking-course Adam knows. Ronan wanted him to know. Why the hell else would he dream him hand lotion, take him on long afternoon drives to beautiful, impossible places, make him a fucking mix tape for god’s sake, if he didn’t want Adam to know? Ronan might not have been great at subtlety, but he knew how to keep a fucking secret. And that? That was not Ronan keeping a fucking secret.

  
But the point of all that was to avoid _this_. Because if Ronan made it obvious enough what he wanted, then he wouldn’t need an unbearably awkward conversation to find out that Adam didn’t. Want him back, that is.

  
And yet here they were, idling in the parking lot of the factory where Adam has to go and start his shift in eight-and-a-half minutes. It’s well-planned, Ronan has to give him that. Adam has prepared a neat, clean getaway to avoid whatever aftermath comes from dashing Ronan’s heart onto the jagged rocks of his rejection.

  
“Christ, Parrish,” he mutters, twisting his fist around the edge of the steering wheel. “What tipped you off?”

  
The question comes out sarcastic, a little mean, a tight but jagged smile tacked on at the end. Because if Adam wants to do this part the hard way, Ronan’s all too happy to oblige.

  
But Adam answers the question promptly, without much weight, “The rent, for one. Taking me out to the Barns. The way you look at me, sometimes. And—” he cracks a small smile here, one that drills down deep between Ronan’s ribs “You dreamed me _hand lotion_.”

  
There’s a sound that could be the beginning of a laugh, but the sudden roaring in Ronan’s ears seems to drown it out. Suddenly there is more than just resignation in Ronan’s lungs. There is anger, hot and bright, and beneath it, shame. Adam is _laughing_. At this, at them. At him.

  
Of all the awful ways Adam could have let him down—quietly, gravely, with staid disaffect—this was not one Ronan saw coming. The rage and the sound of Adam’s laugh hit him like a sucker punch. And Ronan, the Ronan who did all that, who rode on the back of a shopping cart in a grocery store parking lot, is down for the count. In his place is the snarling, snake-like Ronan, the Ronan who dreams nightmares into reality. And this Ronan will say anything, do anything, to walk away unscathed.

  
“Get out,” he snarls, both hands gripping the steering wheel.

  
“Ronan—”

  
“I said _get out,_ Parrish! Go to your pathetic minimum-wage job to pay for your pathetic, dingy life and stay the motherfucking hell out of mine.”

  
He chances a look at Adam then, and sees that his face has gone all closed-off. Still, like clouds hanging low before a storm. Staring straight ahead through the windshield, he hisses, “What the _hell_ is wrong with you?”

  
And before Ronan can come up with a good answer, Adam slams his way out of the BMW and flees across the parking lot. Ronan peels out of there, heart pounding in his ears, and turns onto the main street, not toward Monmouth, but toward the Barns.

* * *

 

There’s a boy curled up on the dusty couch on the bottom floor of Monmouth when Ronan returns.

  
Ronan checks his watch. It’s past midnight. Adam got off work more than two hours ago. And he came here.

  
Ronan doesn’t quite know what to do with that. The Camaro’s not parked outside, so it’s not like he came to see Gansey. But with the way they left things, it doesn’t seem possible that he came here to see Ronan, either. Noah, then?

As he puzzles it out, Ronan gives himself permission to look at the slumbering boy. To stare, if he’s being honest. Even sleeping, there’s exhaustion etched into the elegant lines of his face. Ronan feels something clench and hold in his chest. The ridiculous desire to scoop Adam up and tuck him into bed, or to lay beside him and fit his own body into the curves of Adam’s overwhelms Ronan for a moment.

  
He shakes it off and makes his way across the dusty floor to Chainsaw’s cage, where she’s rustling, having been roused by Ronan’s entrance.  
“Hey there,” he whispers to her, and she cackles affectionately in return.

  
Behind them, the creak of the couch announces that Adam is waking.

  
“Oh.” It’s little more than an exhalation, but Ronan feels his fingers gripping the thin bars of Chainsaw’s cage at the sound. “What time is it?”

  
“Twelve,” Ronan replies brusquely, turning to acknowledge Adam. Because not to do so would be like giving something up, though he’s not sure what.

  
“I didn’t mean to fall asleep,” Adam says, rubbing a hand through his hair.

  
Half-awake Adam is a more vulnerable Adam than he’s used to seeing. Ronan looks back at Chainsaw.

  
“What are you doing here, Parrish?”

  
“Came to see if you were here,” Adam replies easily. Ronan can hear him stretching, the slight yawn that escapes him. “You weren’t. Obviously.”

  
“I was at the Barns,” Ronan replies with a half-shrug. He’s gotten Chainsaw’s cage open, but she seems to prefer staring judgmentally at Ronan from the corner.

  
“Oh,” Adam says again. “Why’d you come back so late? I mean, don’t you usually sleep out there when you go?”

  
Ronan shuts Chainsaws cage and faces Adam, who’s now sitting up, perched at the edge of the couch.

  
“Had to feed Chainsaw.” It’s an excuse, but it isn’t a lie. He won’t tell Adam the real reason, which is that ever since he brought Adam to the Barns and showed him the dream-thing, it hasn’t felt right being there alone. If there’s one thing he can hate Adam for in all this, it’s that he ruined the one place in the world that was Ronan’s.

  
But even that isn’t his fault. Ronan was the one who brought him there, who invited him into softest, most carefully sheltered parts of himself. It was this decision, it seems to Ronan now, that had spurred everything else, that had put them here, now, staring at one another across an impassable distance.  
So he can’t blame Adam for any of it.

  
The silence between them has stretched on long enough now that Ronan can see the discomfort creeping into Adam’s expression. He looks down at his lap, and Ronan thinks maybe he can just freeze him out, maybe Adam will just leave and go back to St. Agnes without—doing whatever it is he came here for.  
But when Adam looks back up at him, Ronan can tell he’s gonna lose that battle.

  
So Ronan speaks first. “Did you come here for an apology?”

  
“When have I ever expected you to apologize for anything, Lynch?”

  
Fair point.

  
“All right,” Ronan says. Usually when they fight, they never really make up. They just sort of…go onward. But that’s clearly not what’s going to happen this time, otherwise Adam wouldn’t be here. But Ronan is at a loss as to what does happen now. He swallows and says again, “All right. Well.”

  
“You didn’t let me finish, earlier,” Adam says, getting to his feet.

  
“We don’t actually have to do this, Adam. I got it. Message received,” Ronan snarls. “Loud and clear.” He moves to go past Adam, but then there’s a hand gripping his arm, holding him in place.

  
“Message _not_ received.” Adam’s fingers are digging into Ronan’s arm, but it’s the bite in his tone that has Ronan well and truly frozen before him. “You can’t keep doing this.”

  
“I’m not doing anything,” Ronan says automatically. “Not anymore.” And it’s true. He’ll back off, now that he knows Adam wants him to. He would have, anyway.

  
“Stop picking fights with me just because you want to be angry instead of—whatever it is you don’t want to feel.”

  
“Oh, is that what I’m doing?” Ronan asks nastily. “Please, Parrish, enlighten me as to what it is I’m _feeling_.” And he knows—he _knows_ he’s doing it, right now, but he can’t stop himself.

  
“I don’t _know_ ,” Adam says, squeezing Ronan’s arm. “That’s the problem. I don’t know because I’ve been trying to ask you but every time I do your asshole switch gets flicked on. And I’m used to you being an asshole, trust me, but that’s when you’re the usual Ronan-level asshole. Not _this_.”

  
“ _This_ is what you asked for when you brought it up,” Ronan says. “You should have just left it but no, of course not, you had to—”

  
“Look, I get that this is hard,” Adam says, and there’s something strangely vulnerable in his voice. “It’s hard for me, too. I get that. But what I _don’t_ get is how you thought we could do this without ever actually talking about it.”

“Oh, it’s hard for you?” Ronan mocks. “Is that why you were laughing about it?”

  
“What?” Adam’s grip goes loose, and Ronan takes the opportunity to tug himself away.

  
“When I said we don’t need to talk about it, I meant _we don’t need to talk about it_. God, can’t you at least spare me this part?”

  
“Ronan, I wasn’t laughing at you,” Adam says, his voice quiet and serious.

  
“It’s fine,” Ronan says, attempting to sound blandly dismissive. He hadn’t meant to mention it at all, to let Adam know how much his laughter had wounded him, even though it was what had set him off in the first place. “It’s done. We talked. We can be done now.”

  
Adam stares at him, his lips half-parted. Then he’s shaking his head, stepping again toward Ronan, even closer now, his left hand circling around Ronan’s wrist, where the worn leather straps are.

  
“I’m not done,” he says, and just as Ronan begins to realize how upside-down he’s been this entire time, Adam presses his lips against his.

  
It takes Ronan probably a full second to jolt out of frozen shock, and at that point Adam is already pulling away. But Ronan cups a hand around his cheek before he can get too far and kisses him back, every unspoken word swirling between them.

  
And if Ronan wasn’t completely and utterly fucked before, he is now.

  
Then Adam pulls away, but not too far, and Ronan has no idea what idiotic expression is on his face right now, but Adam looks well and truly gutted.

  
He swallows, his gaze flickering between Ronan’s lips and his eyes.

  
“Are you going to let me say what I came here to say now?” Adam asks.

  
And somehow Ronan finds it within himself to produce a smirk. “Think you just proved my point about not needing to talk.”

  
“Ronan I love you.” The words come out so quickly, and Ronan wants to catch them, one by one, like falling pebbles, and hold them in his palm forever. And Ronan gets so caught up thinking about Adam’s words that he forgets about responding until he realizes Adam is staring at him, half-terrified.

  
“Oh,” Ronan says ineffectually. “Well. You know. I do, too. I mean—”

  
It is the most startlingly bad love confession that’s ever happened, Ronan is sure, but he’s saved from further misery by Adam’s laughter.

  
“Oh great, you’re laughing at me again,” Ronan says, but there’s nothing except affection coloring his tone.

  
“Sorry,” Adam says. “And about—before. With the laughing. I was just nervous. And also. You dreamed me hand lotion. You. Ronan Lynch. Dreamed about hand lotion to give to me.”

  
“So?” He refuses, now, to be embarrassed about it. “I was wooing you.”

  
And Adam laughs again. It’s a heady, gleeful sound that Ronan’s not sure he’s ever really heard from him before.

  
“It _worked_ ,” Ronan points out.

  
“Trust me, that is not why I’m here right now.”

  
And Ronan kinda wants to know—why _is_ he here right now? What is it he sees in Ronan, that makes him do things like fall asleep curled up on the couch waiting for Ronan to get home. But Ronan kinda knows already. And he’s kinda done with talking—for now, at least.

  
He steps away from Adam, heads toward the stairs.

  
“Where are you going?” Adam asks. There’s a note of amusement in his voice, but also real confusion.

  
“To sleep,” Ronan answers, starting up the stairs. “It’s like one in the morning, Parrish, and some of us have things to do in the morning.”

  
He hears Adam’s snort and does not need to turn around to see his sarcastic expression. But he turns around anyway, midway up the stairs, and meets Adam’s gaze across the room.

  
“So, you coming?”

**Author's Note:**

> I don't even know you guys, the next eight months are going to be torture.


End file.
